An editorial / By Dale McFeatters, Scripps Howard News Service

After the "birthers," now come the "deathers."

Just as there were those who believed, in the face of all evidence, that President Obama's birth certificate was a fake and that he was not really native born, there are those who believe, again against all evidence to the contrary, that Obama's health-care reform has a provision that encourages, even requires, euthanasia.

As the White House and the GOP Congress drove the federal government ever deeper into the red, Vice President Dick Cheney reportedly said, "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter." Maybe not for the Bush administration, but they are an increasingly grave problem for President Obama and the Democratic Congress and perhaps an even worse problem for whoever comes after them.

Journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee are lucky to have friends in high places, a former vice president, the secretary of State and especially former President Bill Clinton, who had the contacts to borrow an airliner, raise the money and get hurry-up approvals from the White House, State and the FAA to fly to Pyongyang and bring them back to, literally, a Hollywood ending.

In a positive step, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is tightening its oversight of radioactive devices that contain potentially dangerous isotopes.

The North Koreans have been working mightily to break out of the idled six-party negotiating format to talk directly against the United States, perhaps for reasons of prestige, perhaps in hopes of getting a better deal by playing us off against the other four.

Ever since President Obama said he wanted the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prison closed by next January, politicians have been overheating with pledges that the detainees would not set foot in their districts, as if terrorists would be roaming free and not immured in the basement of a super-max facility.

Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, surely thought the fallout from the disputed June 12 election would be over by now -- fallout that he helped precipitate by embracing the presumed winner before the votes were counted.

Why would anybody be surprised -- and some in Congress apparently are -- that the government's "Cash for Clunkers" program is wildly successful?

After the rumors and conspiracy theories, and the periodic Pentagon reviews of his disappearance, the mystery of Navy pilot Scott Speicher may have been as simple as nomadic Bedouins complying with the Islamic requirement that a body be buried as soon as possible after death.

The worst recession since the Great Depression is nearing an end. Statistically, it may already be over.

Gross Domestic Product fell only 1 percent in the second quarter, a half point better than expected. That made four straight quarters of contraction, the first time that's happened since records began being kept after World War II.